After a game or practice, particularly in sports such as hockey or football, sweaty sports equipment is typically packed into an equipment bag and carried home or to a hotel or motel. As is well know, if damp equipment is left in a sports bag, it not only dries slowly but foul odors will accumulate due to mold, mildew and bacteria. Although this problem is most acute in sports such as hockey and football where bulky pads and other equipment are packed tightly into a sports bag after a game and practice, this problem arises in other sports as well.
Accordingly, in order to dry equipment after a game or practice, and in order to help dissipate foul smells, damp sports equipment should be unpacked from the bag and aired out. In sports such as hockey or football, where the pads and equipment are both numerous and bulky, the unpacking and spreading out of all the pads and equipment can take quite a bit of time. Furthermore, sufficient space is needed to spread out all the equipment. Typically, sports equipment is spread out in laundry rooms, garages or basements, or placed on specially-designed equipment racks. Once unpacked, the equipment must be left for quite a long period of time to allow it to dry from mere passive aeration. Therefore, this traditional approach of unpacking and passive aeration has been considered unsatisfactory as it takes too much time and too much space and results in the undesirable emanation of foul odors in a portion of a player's dwelling.
Moreover, unpacking and passive aeration of equipment is particularly inadequate when athletes travel to tournaments and stay in cramped hotel or motel rooms, often sharing rooms with family members or other players. For traveling teams, where space and time are tight, the drying out of equipment between games can be a significant problem. Even when traveling home from a game or practice, wet equipment will tend to emanate foul odors which will impregnate the bag itself or even the player's vehicle, for example, where the journey home is long or where the player stops for a drink or food after the game.
In order to facilitate drying and airing out of sports equipment, some sports bags are provided with meshed vents to passively exchange air with the environment and thus to passively exhaust bad odors from the bag. However, passive aeration is very slow, particularly where wet pads are tightly packed in the bag. Where games or practices are closely scheduled, the equipment seldom has enough time to properly dry out, and thus players end up having to put on damp equipment, an experience which is universally regarded as unpleasant.
In recent years, some sports bag designs have attempted to address this problem by providing active ventilation coupled with air fresheners. For example, Canadian Patent Application 2,295,511 entitled Clothes Dryer Garment Bag disclosed a sports bag with an air distribution manifold in the base of the bag and an externally connected blower fan which blows air into the bag via a hose connected to an inlet mounted in the front panel of the bag. Air therefore flows from the blower through the hose, through the manifold and into the bag, thus driving stale air out of the bag through air filters. However, this apparatus appears to be unduly costly to manufacture and unnecessarily complicated to operate. The apparatus would be expensive to manufacture due to the fairly complex structure of the air distributor manifold in the base of the bag, not to mention the hose connector and the stand-alone blower. Furthermore, the separation of the blower and bag makes the apparatus a bit unwieldy to carry around because not only must the player carry the bag itself but he or she must also transport the hose and blower. Also, in operation, the apparatus occupies a large footprint since the blower and hose extend away from the bag as shown in the published patent application.
Another example of a forced-ventilation sports equipment bag is found in Canadian Patent Application 2,412,700 entitled Drying Bag for Sports Equipment and the Like. This published application discloses a sports equipment bag with a blower fan mounted in an air flow opening in one of the side walls of the bag for blowing air into the bag to drive air out the bag through a screened outlet. Since the fan is mounted in a side wall and since there is only a single outlet, the bag cannot be placed arbitrarily. Rather, the bag must be placed such that both the fan and the screened outlet are unobstructed. Therefore, the design of the bag unduly limits the orientation and location in which the bag can be set up.
These designs are therefore suboptimal for the reasons articulated above. A simpler, easier-to-use and more versatile equipment bag would therefore be highly desirable.